iPhone Speed vs. Number of Apps?

Has anyone thought about how the number of apps installed might affect overall responsiveness of the iPhone? I had 38 apps installed, but the Other prt of the memory tracer in iTunes was still only about 330 MB, not much. And overall, it seemed as if about 40% of my device was free after counting music, podcasts, and videos installed on it. Yet when I uninstalled several apps that I kept mainly out of curiosity, I have the impression that the OS got more responsive.

Is there any sense to this? Or am I just dreaming? I've never seen any discussion about how much free memory one ought to keep to promote effective overall performance.

If you have extra space, even with tons of apps installed, I don't think it should affect the iPhones performance since only one 3rd-party app can run at a time, so the memory would not be affected like in an OS that allowed multiple apps to run.

I can understand if an app has bugs and causes actions while the app is open to run slow like getting calls, switching songs, etc.

Well if the iphone OS really is a scaled down version of OSX then it would make sense that more programs would cause a slowdown. As you may or may not know, OSX treats each application on the desktop as a seperate folder so it seems to reason that iPhone OS may do the same.

MacRumors attracts a broad audience
of both consumers and professionals interested in
the latest technologies and products. We also boast an active community focused on
purchasing decisions and technical aspects of the iPhone, iPod, iPad, and Mac platforms.